German invasion of Denmark

The German invasion of Denmark was a six-hour campaign of World War II that followed the German military invading Denmark by land, sea, and air on 9 April 1940. The Germans quickly occupied Denmark, meeting almost no resistance, and the Germans therefore showed leniency towards the Danish government.

The Germans had been considering establishing naval bases in Norway since October 1939, just a month after the start of World War II; doing so could threaten British naval superiority in the North Sea. The British also planned to invade Norway, claiming that Germany was abusing its neutrality and that Norway was trading goods with the Germans. In January 1940, Adolf Hitler took over personal control of Operation Weserubung, the planned invasion of Scandinavia. Hitler gave Nikolaus von Falkenhorst command of the invasion force for Norway, but the Germans were in need of a springboard for invading Norway. Hitler settled on occupying neutral Denmark to achieve this purpose.

At 4:20 AM on 9 April 1940, the German ambassador to Denmark informed Foreign Minister Peter Munch that German troops were moving into the country to protect Denmark from attack from France and Britain, and he demanded that the Danish authorities and the German troops make contact and that all resistance was to be ceased; otherwise, the Luftwaffe would bomb Copenhagen. German fallschirmjaeger paratroopers landed at two airfields in Aalborg and seized the fortress of Masnedo, and the Wehrmacht assaulted the royal palace of Amalienborg. Their first attack was held off, but German planes began dropping "OPROP!" pamphlets over the city; these pamphlets were written in broken Danish and Norwegian, and they justified the German invasion as fraternally protecting Denmark and Norway from Allied invasion. At the same time, half of the Danish air service was strafed and neutralized by the German air force, and King Christian X of Denmark was afraid that the Germans would bomb Copenhagne. At 6:00 PM, King Christian and the entire Danish government capitulated to the Germans, ending the six-hour campaign, one of the shortest of World War II. Denmark's small army of 15,000 troops had been defeated after very token resistance, and the Germans moved into the country. The war would see Denmark lose 4,000 military dead and 3,000 civilian dead.